Wednesday, June 1, 2011

An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade

Beginning shortly after Charlemagne's death in 814, the inhabitants of
his historical empire looked back upon his reign and saw in it an
exemplar of Christian universality - Christendom. They mapped
contemporary Christendom onto the past and so, during the ninth, tenth,
and eleventh centuries, the borders of his empire grew with each
retelling, almost always including the Christian East. Although the pull
of Jerusalem on the West seems to have been strong during the eleventh
century, it had a more limited effect on the Charlemagne legend.
Instead, the legend grew during this period because of a peculiar fusion
of ideas,
carried forward from the ninth century but filtered through the social,
cultural, and intellectual developments of the intervening years.

Paradoxically,
Charlemagne became less important to the Charlemagne legend. The legend
became a story about the Frankish people, who believed they had held
God's favour under Charlemagne and held out hope that they could one day
reclaim their special place in sacred history. Indeed, popular versions
of the Last Emperor legend, which spoke of a great ruler who would
reunite Christendom in preparation for the last battle between good and
evil, promised just this to the Franks. Ideas of empire, identity, and
Christian religious violence were potent reagents. The mixture of these
ideas could remind men of their Frankishness and move
them, for example, to take up arms, march to the East, and reclaim their
place as defenders of the faith during the First Crusade.

Matthew Gabriele is an associate professor and Coordinator of Medieval & Early Modern Studies in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech.

Reviews

"As with all the best exercises in intellectual archaeology, Gabriele’s book raises as many questions as it claims to answer. It is a monograph in the very best sense of the term, showing how a field that some might presume mined to exhaustion can still yield up a rich, albeit highly speculative seam of ore."

"Gabriele has made a powerful and convincing attempt to show that the evolution of Charlemagne myths can reveal a Frankish sense of manifest Christian destiny, and that this self-importance may have spurred at least some of them to follow the crusader road to Jerusalem."

"An Empire of Memory is a book about the power of ideas... Gabriele has a sharp and no-nonsense way of pursuing his subject and, strikingly, runs through his varied and nuanced argument in a mere 159 pages, relying on economy and precision rather than density or aloofness. The net result is most satisfying... [The book] is therefore to be praised for representing an imaginative and instructive contribution to important ongoing debates."

"Gabriele's understanding of Frankishness from c. 800 to c. 1100 results in a thoughtful and thought-provoking monograph...that is intriguing and convincing... [T]he depth of analysis on offer here and its relevance to debates about memory makes this a hugely welcome addition to a growing body of research."

"This efficiently argued and interesting book is an informed and
thoughtful discussion of the ideas and associations that attached
themselves to the memory of Charlemagne between the reign of his
successor Louis the Pious and the First Crusade."

-- Marcus Bull, Crusades

"Why did people go on the First Crusade anyway, and what determined who went? Matthew Gabriele offers, among other things, an answer to that question. His slender book argues that it was a concatenation of fortunate events, for this is an argument about ideas and their power across the centuries... [Gabriele's] is a plausible argument, eruditely rooted in a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including liturgical studies, art history, 'literary' and 'historical' texts..., crusade histories, and current arguments about orality, history, and memory.... The writing is clear and accessible, free of obnoxious jargon, and frequently lively."

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